A Patriotic Coupling

American Man

 

American Woman (ft. American Steed)

Little Boy, Pretty Girl, Awkward Photo

Awkward Family Photos is a go-to website for a bored-at-work afternoon pick-me-up.  Most of the "awkwardness" in the contributed photos derives from dated fashions or photos taken in our inherently most awkward years.  The site is good-hearted nostalgia where twenty to thirty years passing cures any cringe reflex.  We were all there along with the people in the photos.  We can look back at ourselves, laugh, and wonder what were we thinking.

A more contemporaneous photo caught my attention several weeks ago.  Five Hooters beauties surround a young boy who clearly doesn't want to be there:

"Is it over yet? I'm just here for the wings..."

I love that photo, because I was that little boy.  Twenty years ago my younger brother, my dad, his friend and son, and a couple of my uncle took a guy's weekend (with my aunt in tow) to watch Notre Dame football play Purdue (final score, ND 48-0).  Walking around campus in the run-up to the game, we passed two cheerleaders and we asked them to take a photo with us ("we asked" didn't include me).  I was placed next to the very pretty one with the early-90s big hair, who put her arm around my shoulder:

"Is it over yet?"

When I look back on that photo, I'm "smiling" more than I remember (it must have been politeness).  I vividly recall the over-whelming sense of full-consciousness of her hand resting on my shoulder.  I felt exactly what the Hooter's boy's face conveys.  What was I supposed to do?  Certainly not place my hand anywhere on her.  To cheesy middle-schoolers, pretty college girls are an untouchable caste.  I knew to lower my eyes in her presence and not meet her gaze.  In the context of such social asymmetry, the best that can be done is to stand stiff and hope the photo is taken as quickly as possible.

Afterwards my dad and uncles teased me "Ooh, she liked T.J., putting her arm around you!".  Today I wonder if she also felt a similar awkwardness ("what am I supposed to do?"), but her years of cheerleading better equipped her with the art of fake-smiling.  After unconveing this photo I attempted (unsuccessfully) to find a cheerleader's roster from that period, thinking I might be able to locate her online.  Maybe we both might have had a laugh.

Several years after this photo was taken would find me posing similarly with dates in formal dance photos.  It's a slow process to break the "rather-be-hiding" instinctive response.

Gooooooooooooo Irish!

Capturing the Zeitgeist: Superbowl Week 2013

Below is a word cloud created using status updates appearing on my Facebook timeline between Sunday, January 27th, 2013 and noon today.  This is what people talked about the week before Superbowl Sunday:

My Facebook Timeline, Jan. 27 - Feb. 3

A few remarks:

• I'm really surprised people say "just" so much.  Most everything else seems about right.
• I have over 300 friends, but (unsurprisingly) a disproportionate number do the vast majority of postings.  Withing that group, a select few are particularly long-worded, accounting for most of the text.
• I only collected text from status updates, omitting anything showing up in comments to other posts (I still have a day job).  A lot of text was thus omitted.  Also, most postings were non-text: pictures or links to articles.  I'd estimate most links were political.  Of photos, 70% were babies, 29.9% were "what I ate for dinner", and 0.1% was everything else.
• At one point my sense of Facebook postings was an endless cycle of "Can't believe tomorrow is Monday", "Can't believe it's Monday", "So don't want to go to work today", "at least the week's halfway over", "so happy tomorrow is Friday", "TGIF!!!  Is it time to go home yet?".  Repeat until retirement.  I was happy to see none of that this week.  

The Efforts We Never See, the Results We Do

Last month The New York Times Magazine featured Jerry Seinfeld in a short video entitled How to Write a Joke.  In it, Seinfeld deconstructs a single joke.  We are shown how each word is thoughtfully chosen based on how it contributes to the line's timing and sound ("Pop-tart" is just a funny word).  The video's take-away is that funny takes work.  Aside from Jerry Seinfeld's inherent talent, he works very hard at what he does.



Because some people make it look so effortless, I loved how this video reminds us that we never see the first draft.  For years I convinced myself I was just irredeemably a bad writer.  Not until grad school did I learn the guaranteed formula: write more than you need and keep editing until it's good.  My prior writing was bad because my first draft was my first draft and my final version was just my first draft plus spell check.  Better writing is actually easy: start early and revise, revise, and revise.  Maybe the talented people's first drafts are better than mine, but my seventh draft is certainly better than my first.  Revision is how the funniest jokes are written and the best films are made.  Pixar founder John Lasseter said in an interview "every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another".  There's nothing special in Pixar's water: they just keep working on their bad projects until they're not bad anymore.

I thought of all of this as I was cleaning out saved text on my computer (an on-going New Year's resolution).  For years now I've kept a passage written by Joseph Priestly, an eighteenth-century Englishman writing on early scientific inquiry into electricity (among other pursuits).  Using the example of Isaac Newtown, Priestly points out that we give perhaps too much esteem because we only consider others' successes and never imagine their struggles.  This becomes a problem when we think there never were any struggles.  When we believe that success results from inherent talent (which we can't help) rather than hard work (which we can), we are debilitated when we needn't be.  While the Seinfelds', Pixars', and Newtons' products do owe something to talent, through continual effort we may perhaps go farther than we'd otherwise imagine, just only by using their same simple workplans. 

Joseph Priestly, The History and Present State of Electricity (1767):

MANY modest and ingenious persons may be engaged to attempt philosophical investigations, when they see, that it requires no more sagacity to find new truths, than they themselves are masters of; and when they see that many discoveries have been made by mere accident, which may prove as favourable to them as to others. …[I]t is a great discouragement to young and enterprising geniuses, to see philosophers…laying down the propositions which were the result of all their experiments, and then relating the facts, as if everything had been done to verify a true preconceived theory…  [P]erhaps, in no branch of science has there been less owing to genius, and more to accident...

WERE it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time that he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. But if, when a man publishes discoveries, he, either through design, or through habit, omit the intermediate steps by which he himself arrived at them; it is no wonder that his speculations confound others, and that the generality of mankind stand amazed at his reach of thought. If a man ascend to the top of a building by the help of a common ladder, but cut away most of the steps after he has done with them, leaving only every ninth or tenth step; the view of the ladder, in the condition in which he has been pleased to exhibit it, gives us a prodigious, but an unjust idea of the man who could have made use of it. 

THAT Sir Isaac Newton himself owed something to a casual turn of thought, the history of his astronomical discoveries informs us; and where we see him most in the character of an experimental philosopher, as in his optical inquiries…we may easily conceive that many persons, of equal patience and industry (which are not called qualities of the understanding) might have done what he did. And were it possible to see in what manner he was first led to those speculations, the very steps by which he pursued them, the time that he spent in making experiments, and all the unsuccessful and insignificant ones that he made in the course of them…our admiration would probably decrease. Indeed he himself used candidly to acknowledge, that if he had done more than other men, it was owing rather to a habit of patient thinking, than to anything else

The Electric Mr. Priestly